Reaper of Souls

Abacus; 2006

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Over its decades-long existence, heavy metal has undergone several transformations, at times fading into the background, biding its time before emerging again as something new and refreshing. Throughout the early 1990s, bands like Death and Deicide seemed to inspire every longhair with a guitar to write blurred, panic-stricken riffs, and then growl painfully bleak lyrics about demonic possession or involuntary surgery. That's cool, though; there were some great bands back then. But just as with thrash metal a few years earlier, before death metal's initial light began to fade, critical mass was achieved. Too many bands were doing the same thing, forking every devil horn in the same manner, every head banging to the same beat.

A few years later, though, things were looking up as a new breed emerged, blending old-school death metal mentality with an increased emphasis on melody as well as hardcore's muscle and groove. But now here we are again, with Norway's Purified in Blood, whose Reaper of Souls tries its hardest to drive listeners to sacrifice a potato or something (the band are staunch vegans), but in the end just ends up sounding like a rote hardcore-influenced thrash band. The riffs are mighty, the tempos are appropriately blazing, and the vocals growl and screech with an admirable amount of bestial rage, but in the end there's not a lot to set the band apart from their peers.

That's not to say this is a bad album. On "Gates of Gehenna", the bridge riff is at once so familiar and exciting that if I didn't know better, I'd swear it was lifted from somewhere else. But it's just the bridge, a few seconds out of a four-minute song. The mid-section of "Venom" is also striking when the pounding double bass drops to a slow throb before launching into one of the album's most melodic riffs. It's a build up Dave Lombardo would be proud of, but it seems like Slayer-aping is the band's go-to trick to mix things up.

Unfortunately, not every song houses even these minor moments of individuality. These tracks are so uniform that it becomes hard to tell them apart. The length of each track falls within a minute of the others, and every moment is relentless with guitar-noodling and vocal barking. Over a year ago, in a review of the Black Dahlia Murder's Miasma, I commented on how that band was able to take many of death metal's characteristics and update them without sounding derivative. It's disappointing that while Purified in Blood attempts the same feat, they rarely sound all that inventive. Frankly, they just end up sounding a little too much like the Black Dahlia Murder.